Posts tagged “mac”.

I had another IcyDock, firewire, external, drive enclosure fail again. So instead of throwing good money after bad, I instead acquired a NAS (network attached storage) device. Specifically, I got a Synology DS211J from Amazon with reward points on my credit card. Yes, I paid $0 for it and it’s the best money I never spent.

The NAS, which I named NASty, holds two SATA drives and has a host of RAID configurations available. I have two 2TB drives mirrored, split into three Volumes, with access controls, users, passwords, and a smorgasbord of applications, not the least of is a VPN server so I can access my files remotely when I’m away from home. On one Volume I moved all of my Music, and set iTunes to look on the remote drive for my music database. Which is good for sharing my music through the house, but was causing me some pain and mental anguish on my laptop when I forgot to first ‘mount’ the drive before opening iTunes.

When opening iTunes prematurely, as the case is, my podcasts would download to the local drive and I would have to clean it up manually to get it back onto the NAS and have it recognized in the iTunes program. Annoying. So, I thought to myself, I should script it so the NAS music share mounts first, then iTunes opens. So… I programmed an iTunes Launcher for my new setup.

-- iTunes Launcher
-- for use with a music database stored on a remote NAS

-- define our Function to check if an application is running
on appIsRunning(appName)
tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning

-- check for the existence of our music share
try
alias "/Volumes/music"
on error

-- if the share doesn't exist mount it

tell application "Finder"

mount volume "music" on server "NASty" in AppleTalk zone¬

"*" as user name "music-user" with password "pass-word"

-- not my username nor my password…

end tell
end try

-- Test to see if our mount is really there.

tell application "Finder"

if not (exists POSIX file "/Volumes/music/itunes/.NAStyIsMounted") then
display alert "NASty Music Share not Mounted!" as critical giving up after 90
return
end if
end tell

-- Is iTunes running

if appIsRunning("iTunes") then
-- if so, do nothing
else
-- otherwise start iTunes
launch application "iTunes"
end if

-- bring iTunes window to the foreground
tell application "iTunes"
activate
tell window 1
if not visible then set visible to true
end tell
end tell

So just a tiny little script that checks to see if the music share is mounted already. If not, I mount it. I then make sure it mounted, if I can’t see the hidden file on the share I go OLD SCHOOL and ABEND. Otherwise I continue and check to see if iTunes is running. If not, I start it. And to finish up, now that I know iTunes is running, I bring it to the front.

I saved the script as an application. I changed the icon from the default AppleScript icon to a custom icon. Then I dropped the Launcher program onto my dock. So now I not only have a graphical reminder on my dock, but I removed the iTunes icon so I can’t accidentally open just the program without mounting the share first.

I sit at an “L” shaped desk in my home office; to my left is my personal mac book pro, in front of me is my work PC. I was working feverishly this afternoon when I smelled something burning. Specifically, I smelled plastic burning. I jumped up from my desk panicked that my house was on fire.

I dashed out of my office headed for the closest of two fire extinguishers we keep in the house when I realized with a shock that I no longer smelled the burning plastic out in the hallway. Relieved that it wasn’t the pre-wired Christmas tree melting downstairs I bolted back into my office, feared an electrical fire, and frantically worried over what action I could take if it were the wiring in the walls.

I entered my office and sniffed the air in front of me like a bloodhound. It came from my desk. Then I saw wafts of faint grey smoke which rose over the back of my MacBook Pro. I moved all the wires away from my computer. I quickly disconnected the power cord, Firewire 800, and USB wires that were plugged into the device; fearing a short circuit I inspected each wire. The wires were fine, not warm at all and still a smell like burning nylon persisted. I picked up the computer and sniffed it. Immediately I knew something inside my MacBook Pro had melted.

I opened a window, turned on the overhead fan, and aired out the room. The smell dissipated quickly. I realized I felt a little light headed; that too quickly passed. With the power cord unplugged, the laptop only running on battery power, everything seemed fine. I immediately started a backup of my data. I’ve heard horror stories about Apple support replacing whole devices and not restoring data — that wasn’t going to happen to me. I then looked for the support number and called Apple Care.

My Apple Care phone experience was extremely pleasant. My computer is under warranty and they scheduled an appointment for me to meet a technician at the local Apple Store in town. While I was on hold, on a whim, I plugged the power cord back into my computer. I immediately smelled the burning plastic again, and unplugged it promptly.

So, some time in the not too distant future an Apple technician will crack open my laptop and either see a stray bit of plastic that got too close to something hot, or identify a faulty part and replace it. Either way, I think my next Apple purchase will be Apple Care for my MacBook Pro.

Last year, June 2009 to be more precise, I contracted imemories to digitize some old 8mm film that I had saved from my parents. It was pretty expensive, but I didn’t have a lot to do. I figured I’d break the job up into smaller bits and spread the cost over a few years. I’m glad I got part of it done before my father passed away this summer. I think that motivated me to make sure all of the video I’ve taken over the years was safe.

So back in March of 2010 I started a project to ‘recover’ all my home video. I could have used imemories to do this also, but I had so much video, it wasn’t cost effective to pay someone else to do the conversion work. It would have been tens of thousands of dollars for them to do it. And sure most of the tedious, boring, busy-work would have been farmed out; but, I’d still be stuck doing the hard work of categorizing and editing the video. It just wasn’t a cost effective solution. Plus, I had almost everything I needed. My old Video8 VHS camcorder still worked. I had a way to capture and digitize the analog footage. I just needed to pick up a miniDV camcorder that was in working condition to digitize the close to fifty hours of miniDV footage I had. Thank goodness for Craig’s List! I found a working camera for $80 and after about a month of working, I completed Phase 1 of the project — getting everything onto a hard drive.

Thinking this through, phase 2 might still be uncompleted. Phase 2 consisted of getting everything into an iMovie format ready for archival and editing. I migrated computers and think I may have several dozen hours of Video8 footage in EyeTV format. If that’s the case, I’ll figure it out after Phase 4, which will be the accounting and audit phase to make sure I didn’t miss anything. If I missed anything, Phase 5 will be to do whatever it takes to finish the project. I do mean, “Whatever it takes!”

So, I find myself here, in phase 3 — “Compression and Archival”. Since I started this whole process, I learned that iMovie saves my HDTV footage from my newest camcorders in Apple Intermediary Codec format. This is the native format that iMovie uses for editing. My understanding is that it’s a lossless codec and takes up 50% of the space that DV encoded events do. With this new knowledge, I am in the process of re-encoding all my DV footage to be this newly discovered native apple format. Afterwards, I plan on encoding each event as a .mov and .m4v file, then archive it onto optical medium (DVD +R DL).

I just started this last week. So far, I’m working on my third event. I think I could do an event a day: it takes about four hours to encode both formats and two hours to burn it to disc with verification for each hour long event… some events are two hours long. It takes ten minutes to set it up to start, two minutes to export to the 2nd format after one two hour conversion, then ten more minutes to set up the disc burning. So, about twenty two minutes of real computer work per day of waiting. Taking into consideration the lack of efficiency on my part, and the inevitable hurdles I’ll come across, let’s say I can complete five events a week. At around a hundred and twenty hours of events I’m looking at approximately four months of work for this phase. The product will be a DVD library of cataloged, home, video footage in neat little DVD cases with covers and explanations of what is contained within.

Wow, sounds a bit OCD, doesn’t it? Well, you know what they say… if the skin fits… wash it! They don’t really say that… it was my attempt at OCD-humor. Forget it. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and is sometimes epitomized by the frequent washing of one’s hands — it’s also epitomized by the compulsive need to explain failed humor, inform and enlighten others, and generally drone on for hours, blogging crap no one will ever read. But I digress.

“So what,” you say? So, I started another phase of this monumental task. I do it for me, to keep track of time, but, mostly to show that if you break it up into small enough pieces, no matter how big the task is you can tackle it.

How’s that for a blog entry really about nothing pulling a moral and life lesson out of nowhere! I think what I just did needs a name. If we were playing hockey, it would be comparable to a hat-trick, so let’s call it a head-trick!

I broke down a few weeks ago and bought games for my kids computer. I picked up the “Game of Life, Path to Success”, “Monopoly, Here and Now”, and “Scrabble” all for the Machintosh in a “Board Game Trio II” pack. They came to about $8 a title after shipping, which is my price point for trivial software. I thought it was a great deal. But it got even better when the software didn’t behave as expected. So now I didn’t just have great cheap games. I had great cheap games that “non-privledged users” couldn’t save their progress on. I called support, and they were very polite and helpful, but I was going to have to wait for the guy who actually programmed the games to get back into the office for the solution to my specific issue. It might be a day or so.

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not one for waiting. And, I figured it was a challenge. Could I figure it out before the programmer emailed me with the answer? The clock was running. I had myself a hacking opportunity!

So, I first started up the game as a privileged user and created a character with a name of “Rumplestiltzkin”. I then searched for \*umplestiltzkin\* with the UNIX command find, hoping that the character’s name was used in the save file on disk. No luck. Without knowing the filename, and not having the character’s name in the filename, I was at a big loss.

Then I said to myself, “Self, there aught to be a program that tells you what files are being accessed on your system.” To which I replied, “Well, self, if such a program exists, I bet google knows about it!”

I searched Google for a few minutes and came up with a shareware/nag-ware program called fseventer which allowed me to see what files were being accessed real time. The only file that looked promising was /Applications/Game\ of\ Life\ -\ Path\ to\ Success.app/Contents/Resources/Source/gol.txt. I opened gol.txt up in Textedit, scrolled to the bottom, and there in clear text was Rumplestiltzkin! I had found the save file!

Now when I did a directory listing with the command “ls -al” it listed gol.txt as -rw-rw—- which means that the owner and group may read and write to the file, but everyone else has no access. This is easily fixed with a quick terminal command run in the directory where gol.txt exists: “chmod 666 gol.txt”. What that does is sets the file to “-rw-rw-rw” permissions, which allows everyone on the system to read and write to the file.

666 may seem a bit satanic, but trust me, it’s not. The permissions are binary, and the values for each group are READ which equals 4, WRITE which equals 2, and EXECUTE which equals 1. These three bits in binary, if they were all on would be 111, or 7 in decimal. For read and write permissions only it would be 110 in binary or 6 in decimal. For read only permissions it would be 100 in binary or 4 in decimal. And for read and execute permissions it would be 101 in binary and 5 in decimal. For more information about unix permissions… read a book, google unix permissions, or take a look at this cool unix permission calculator!

I figured it out before I read the email reply from the support department, however, I didn’t fix it before the email arrived. Can I claim a tie?

I really like Apple’s new Snow Leopard OS. If you look back through my blog you’ll see my trials and tribulations I went through, lamenting the upgrade. I felt that Leopard was never quite up to par — that it fell short of Tiger in many ways. I really liked Tiger, that was a solid operating system.

But in any good OS, you have to be able to tweak it; customize it in seemingly mindless little ways to make it yours. It starts with naming your machine. There’s a big difference between a machine named “Dilbert” or one named “Loki”. And you want to start from there and expand. Tweaking your background, cursors, file icons, screen animations, you name it… it should be tweakable and fit into your Norse Mythological scheme or your Dilbert Philosophy.

Please don’t misunderstand me where I’m about to go next. I love astronomy. I like Apple’s sense of style and design. But, I never liked the Aurora.jpg that was the default background for Leopard. I wasn’t happy when it became my default background when I upgraded to Snow Leopard from Tiger. And I wasn’t happy when changing my Desktop background as an administrator there wasn’t a checkbox to Change Login Background also.

It annoyed me. I really grew to despise that image. And for months I’ve searched and searched for the solution — how do I eradicate Aurora.jpg from displaying on my mac? Finally I recently became obsessed and refusing defeat I continued searching Google. Coincidentally, Googles new “Bing” tools made the difference and I finally found the solution.

I chose to copy the Horizon.jpg image to the DefaultDesktop.jpg image. But you can choose any image you like.

And that is how to change the default background image for the login page on Mac OS X version 10.6 otherwise known as Snow Leopard. And just as a side note and a way to help other “search engine challenged people” like myself, it helps to figure out the file name of the image you’re searching for and not just call it space image, leopard default image, and other generic things like that.

I’m a little disappointed in Apple. I think it was MUCH too complicated for the Mac experience. I think Apple should pay closer attention to making every little thing easy to customize… and easy to restore to its default values in future versions of their Operating Systems.

It will be the little things that matter in the near future too. The devil is in the details. Google is pressing the court and developing Android to complete with the iPhone. It won’t be long until they follow in Apple’s footsteps and take a Linux kernel and make an OS that rivals Mac OS (although Apple used BSD Unix instead of Linux, I can’t see Google making that same choice).